A very ordinary day.

I try a slight new routine, moving my blocks of work around. This seems to be a faint success. I put on 2277 words of book. We are at that stage. I’m just typing my head off. This is not ideal practice, but deadlines must.

Today, I had to do some exposition. I hate it. I’m bad at it. But sometimes it must be done. Sometimes you can’t do fireworks and sparkling prose and look at me doing a bloody tap dance; sometimes you just have to move the story forward.

The mare is still a little sore in her shoulder, so she gets the day off. She is funny and clever this morning and makes me laugh. She has learnt what the word breakfast means. I let her out into the set-aside for her morning free graze as the feed is mixed. Then, when it is all soaked and done and ready, I go out and yell ‘breakfast is ready’, and she lifts her head, looks at me as if to say ‘do you mean it?’, and lopes up from the far corner, bringing her little Paint with her.

She sticks her head in the shed to check the food has been properly prepared, with her best duchess face on, rather like Debo Devonshire being shown the new asparagus at Claridge’s. (I have no idea whether the D of D actually eats asparagus at Claridge’s, but this is the state of my loon brain at the moment.) I look at the mare, and point and click, and she walks kindly in through the gate and takes her position by the fence.

You’re not really supposed to do this with a thoroughbred. It’s not BHS-approved. You’re supposed to take them out in a rope and halter for their pick and then lead them back to the field. A chestnut mare descended from a Derby winner is not supposed to go gently in the direction indicated from a mere twitch of one human finger. But then, Red the Mare is one of the cleverest people I ever met.

Stanley the Dog gets to have a mighty rumble with Edward the Puppy, in the autumn leaves. I go to do my HorseBack work. I eat a ham sandwich for lunch. I do not seem to be furious any more. Just a little overwhelmed with work and wishing it were slightly less muddy and a bit jangly round the edges. About par for the course, as I rush towards deadline.

Or, in other words, a very ordinary day.

 

Today’s pictures:

Interestingly, even though Edward is a quarter Stanley’s size, and very much the junior dog, he gives as good as he gets. Mostly mornings, he stands on his hind legs and boxes Stan the Man in the face with his front paws. Mr Stanley takes it all with amazing grace.

Did not take the camera to the paddock today, so these are from a couple of days ago. We haven’t had Myfanwy the Pony for a while, because she has been taking the opportunity afforded by the change in the weather to COVER HERSELF IN MUD, no doubt as some kind of health cure. I finally managed to catch her on a faintly clean day:

Appreciating the silver service:

‘I think I would prefer the French dressing to the melted butter….’ (Sorry, still on asparagus at Claridge’s theme.)

Rather serene hill:

Almost sure this shall be filled with typos and howlers. Brain gone phut. So bear with me.

The red mist descends.

Shattered. Idiotic amount of words today: 2736. This is really too many. When you write that much, you know that a lot of it will be dead wood. But deadline fever is on me, and I must bash bash bash away. I find that I seem to have invented a WHOLE NEW CHARACTER. He appears now to be vital, but it means instead of coasting towards the happy close, I am now wrestling and wrangling with novelty. Bugger bugger bugger. I am having to say no to things I really want to do. This makes me sad and angry. It is all my own fault, for not being quicker, slicker, more industrious, more organised. I was so cross that I was scratchy with my animals, with breaks every single one of my golden rules. Even love and trees are not working today. I am in a red ball of rage. I know I always say, blithely, easily, that every day can’t be Doris Day, but really.

I expect the fury and the tension and the shoulders around my ears will have subsided by tomorrow. I’ll be all sugar and spice again. In the meantime, I am rats’s tails and iron filings and undifferentiated bits of murky muck. Bloody human condition; some days it drives me lunatic nuts in the head.

 

No pictures today. Far too cross for the camera. When even this face cannot do the trick, I know I am in deep waters:

A still Sunday. A horse in a million.

Perhaps the loveliest thing a horse can do is choose to remain with its human. It is a half ton flight animal. It could flick you over with a shift of its powerful hindquarters. It could canter off into the four acres of its wide paddock. It could pretty much do anything.

There are mornings when Red has stuff to get on with. She is the lead mare in her little herd, and she has responsibilities. Sometimes, when I have finished with her, she will dwell for a moment, and then politely lead her band off to start the next part of their day. But sometimes, she is in her still Zen trance, the one where every atom in her great, muscular, thoroughbred body is at rest. Sometimes, she appears to love being in human company. Everything in her goes soft: her eyes, her ears, her velvet mouth. She stays and stays, lowering her head for love. She breathes gently and is at one with her world and with her person. A profound content comes out of her as if it is a gentle, living thing. I feel it going from her body to mine, and that’s where I run out of words.

As we walk slowly down our long and winding path together, this happens more and more often. I work with her pretty well now. I know a lot more than when I started. I understand more about how equines think; I understand a great deal more about her, as an individual. I study her and can map her moods. I can get her to perform some fairly technical manoeuvres.

But these moments of stillness and togetherness, when our hearts are at rest, give me more deep, singing joy than anything else. It feels like my greatest achievement, by a country mile, that there are slow Sunday mornings when she simply chooses, generously, kindly, freely, of her own lovely volition, to be with me.

 

Today’s pictures:

Oh, that face:

With her sweet little Paint friend:

Ready for their close-up:

I stood with her for perhaps twenty minutes this morning, as the Horse Talker and I chatted and chatted. (I mean: did some serious observation of herd behaviour.) Red ducked her head so I could scratch her sweet spot and sometimes rested on my shoulder. The dear Paint filly came up on the other side, and stood too. So there we all were, in a little circle of calm, doing nothing, doing everything. I am not experienced enough to give anyone advice about equines, but if I were asked, I would say: one of the most important things you can do is spend time with your horse. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for them is just be.

Mr Stanley and I had a very important visitor on Friday. I think he had a pretty good time:

And the full beauty and nobility which is Stanley the Dog, cleverly matching the autumn leaves:

No hill today. The cloud is low.

A slender silver lining.

1943 words of book. HorseBack work; interesting new people met. Amazing level of equine sweetness in the paddock.

And: one of the most difficult telephone calls I’ve had to make since I can remember.

The catastrophically stupid thing which I spoke of a while ago, which is too stupid to elaborate, is not just something which I have to fix up myself. It has ramifications. It means that I have had to let someone down. And that someone is one of the people I love most in the world.

It took a week for me to summon the courage to make the call. Not only would I have to admit the shaming thing, but I would have to do the letting down. I played it and played it in my head, and it never came out any better.

Eventually, I made it. I had to do it on the move. Weirdly, I remember this from after my father died. I wanted to speak to the best beloveds, but I could not do it sitting at my desk. The extreme emotions and the truths which must be told required locomotion. I walked round and round the compound, talking and crying into my mobile telephone, whilst the Duchess and the Pigeon trotted faithfully and quizzically behind me. This morning was like that. I just set off walking, and once I was speaking I was concentrating so hard on the difficult things I was saying that I did not think where I was going. My steps, on automatic pilot, took me straight down to the field. There, my other duchess stood, my equine version, as if waiting for me.

Still talking, explaining, apologising, recriminating against my own folly, I stood, instinctively, next to my horse, one hand gentling the side of her cheek as she rested against me. Some of the time, I was so seized in the conversation that I hardly knew she was there. Then, in the pauses, I was acutely aware of her, of her stillness, her kindness, the steadiness of her; she is always there, in the rain and the shine, literal and metaphorical. She does not care that I have done something stupid; she stays by my side because I am her person. I think, abruptly, that probably the only creature in the world with whom I am not stupid is this horse. For some reason that I cannot identify, she brings out my best self, and that is one of her many, many gifts, which she gives so generously, every day.

The beloved human to whom I was speaking made the awful conversation as easy as it could have been, for all my dread. She did not judge or question. She offered understanding, generosity, sympathy, help. Her good heart was open as wide as the human heart can go. I felt humbled and lucky and passionately grateful. Interestingly, she is also one of those ones who bring out my best self. When I am with her, I am just a little bit funnier and cleverer and brighter. I do not have to explain myself or fake anything or worry about flaws.

Sitting now, writing this, I still have crushing angst, because the stupid thing was all my own fault and I should know better. I should not have had to make that call, nor rely on the generosity of the beloved human. At the same time, I am reminded of my astonishing luck to have such a person. I suppose that it is easy to have friends in the good times; it’s when you are up against it that the great ones rise to their full magnificence and show what they are made of.

I shall remember that conversation, the black box of the telephone pressed hard against my ear, my voice rising strained and fraught into the Scottish air, the good steady mare breathing by my side, the good human heart offering only love and understanding on the other end of the receiver.

The silver lining is very, very thin at the moment, almost invisible to the naked eye. But it is there. Every damn cloud has one.

 

No time for pictures. I have hit the wall. But this is the face which greets me each morning; this is the look which she wore today, even though it was cold and dreich and she had rain in her mane, and she has a little bit of a sore shoulder after a slip yesterday. You have to imagine it accompanied by a sweet, low whinny, which is her customary morning hello:

In which I shoot off on a slightly unexpected tangent.

I had something interesting to say today. I really did. I think it was about life. Or horses. Or horses and life. Or writing even. Or writing and horses and life.

It’s gone.

Bugger.

I did 1493 words this morning and that has probably emptied my brain out. Which is a pity. I saw a piece on the internet yesterday about how to be successful in promoting your book. It’s the kind of thing I look at every so often, when I am feeling pressed and stressed. Have a good blog, it says, sternly, with excellent content. Hmm, I think. Does playing Willie Nelson to your mare count as excellent content?

Actually, the point of this place is not professional at all. It is all amateur hour. Amateur in the true sense of the word, from love. I write the blog from love – for words, for the good old human condition, for the idea of sharing. I know that sounds madly hippy and in fact dippy, but I’m huge for the balm of shared experience. I had it only this morning. I admitted something, about which I was a little worried and self-critical. The person to whom I was talking admitted the exact same thing back. So there was the glorious Me Too moment. I sometimes think that the point of blogs, between readers and writers, is the Me Too moment. The shoulders come down, the gusty sigh comes from the belly: I am not the only one who is a flake or gets tangled up in things or has the strange shouting voices in the head. I am not the only one who sometimes finds life a baffling and peculiar thing.

After Backwards, I think I got a bit cocky. I’d written some things in it which I thought were true. I had a slight sense of accumulated knowledge. It was as if I was saying: I’ve been round the block a few times, and this is what I know. I remember being particularly proud of the section about love.

Then my dad died, and I went to three funerals in three weeks, and my first dog died, and then, months later, my second dog died. It was a mortality attack. Yesterday, almost a year on, I missed that second dog so much I could hardly breathe. I have the enormous loves that are Red the Mare and Stanley the Dog, but the lost loves still leave a crack in the heart. I missed my sweet, soft Pigeon and knew that there would never be another like her.

After all this season of grief, it wasn’t that life got bad or sad, or that all the things I thought I knew counted for nothing. It’s that it just got a little bit harder. It was as if I was upped in grade, and perhaps distance too; like a young chaser, I would have to sharpen up my jumping and improve my fitness.

I imagine that this happens to people in their middle age. It is not remarkable. I have to concentrate more keenly, dig a little deeper for the meaning of things, be quite strict about not letting myself fall out of balance. I am preoccupied with those pesky existential questions of this stage in life, and find that doing actual ordinary stuff (paperwork, errands, returning calls) is more of an effort.

I also think that the pendulum will swing back. People in their fifties suddenly get happier, interestingly. And it’s not that I am not happy. I have singing moments of mad joy. My horse can make me laugh so much that the shouting can be heard echoing across half the county.

But I can get blown off course quite easily. I find myself vulnerable to buffets and blows. I would like to be more hardy. And perhaps more sanguine. I wonder if these are things which can be built up, until they go into muscle memory. I would like to be quicker, more efficient, more realistic, more sensible. I would like to be able to apply the accumulated knowledge of forty-six years in a more utile way. I would like to feel less chipped about the edges, or, at least, to understand that even with the chips I may still gallop off towards the horizon.

Well, that was unexpected. I sat down convinced I had nothing to write, and I have bared my soul. Blogs are a mysterious business.

I cast a yearning glance at the Delete button. There is absolutely no need for you to know all this. There is no need for me to write it. It is just life, pretty much as all females of a certain age face it. Perhaps pretty much as all humans face it. It’s not headline news. But I take the yearning glance away. I shall publish and be damned. Because what the flaky voice in my head says is that, somewhere out there, in the dark, there will be one human saying: Me Too.

 

Today’s pictures:

Today was drab, so these are from sunnier days:

And the hill, under a flat white sky:

A long day.

Right. It’s been quite a long and not very satisfying day. It’s cold and my poor old body is creaking as the first suspicion of winter comes in and there is mud everywhere and I did not write enough damn words. I am cross with myself for putting off until tomorrow what I should be doing today.

Very grumpy, I stumped down to the paddock to give the girls their tea. Then, I remembered that I had seen a clip on the internet last night where a woman danced with her horse. Apparently, horses love music. It’s a sound wave thing or something. Admittedly, it was slightly idiosyncratic, but bugger it, I grew up in the House of Idiosyncrasy. I was about nine before I discovered that not all fathers drank a steady stream of whisky macs whilst doing their day job. (Although, to be fair, I don’t know how you survive a wet afternoon at Huntingdon without a whisky mac.)

Sod ‘em if they can’t take a joke, I thought. I’ll see if the red mare wants to dance. I parked the car in the set-aside, opened all the doors, put Willie Nelson on at full blast, singing Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys, and invited my glorious girl for a turn around the floor.
Turns out she does not like Willie Nelson.

I got the full de haut en bas Lady Bracknell look, more duchessy than the Duchess of Devonshire at a duchesses’ convention in Duchessville.

It made me shout with laughter. I actually doubled over, in the cartoon hilarity manner. I gasped and slapped my sides. She watched me kindly. The old girl’s had a long day, she was clearly thinking.

She looked faintly mollified when What Now My Love came on, and we stepped about a bit and did a turn or two.

Then I worked her normally for fifteen minutes, rugged her, hugged her, and let her follow me up to the top gate for tea, as Willie’s lovely, cracked, mournful voice followed us through the cold Scottish air.

This horse can do anything. She makes my heart lift in my chest like a balloon filled with helium. But she don’t dance.




That was pretty much the look I got. ONLY MORE DUCHESSY.

Standing still.

Really good horse people have a profound stillness to them. Some of them even speak slowly. It is as if the very atoms of their body are configured peacefully, as if they are utterly at home with themselves. This transmits itself to the horse, and it means safety. I’m not sure that horses love in the way that humans think of the word, but it is true that they feel enduring attachments, and I think they do this to the ones who make them feel safe.

I am not at all still at the moment. I am stretched and twanging like an elastic band. I am racing up against deadlines. I have done something catastrophically stupid which must be fixed, and I’m not yet quite sure how to fix it. (All my dander and gritted teeth are going to be needed, and a lot of moral fibre to fight off crashing shame for my own idiocy.)

I have a tendency to spin my wheels when I am panicking like this. I rush around and seem to be performing a great deal of activity very fast, but when I look back at the end of the day, I’m not sure how much I have actually achieved. All the tension and lashing seem to be more sound and fury, signifying nothing. It’s as if I am trying to prove something, hanging out more flags of sheer motion. LOOK AT ME, DOING STUFF.

I am trying to teach myself, at the age of forty-six, to go slowly, to get things done quietly, as I believe this will be more efficient. My irrational mind is yelling: no no no, go faster, FLAP YOUR ARMS ABOUT. So everyone can SEE, it adds, slyly. (The irrational voice is both irrational and very, very naughty.)

I am even making asinine false economies like not riding the mare. I can’t ride when the world is so oppressed. No, no, sorry; what I mean is, I can’t ride when every second is precious, when I could be bashing away at the keyboard and fixing the catastrophic stupidity.

The Remarkable Trainer will keep Red ticking over. She seems resigned to my mad flap rushing in and rushing out. But when I go down to the field to tell the RT this, there is, at last, a moment of stillness. I screech up in the car, hurl myself across the ground, breathless, to tell her that I cannot stay. Red the Mare is tied up at the gate, getting the mud brushed off her. She has been wallowing like a hippo since the rain came and looks more like a happy carthorse than the duchess she is. I always tell myself that I must leave my troubles at the gate, because tightness and tension are the first things that a horse picks up on. It is not for them to soothe us humans; it is our job to make them feel steady and safe. I feel this very, very strongly.

But today, I am breaking all my good rules. Every inch of my body is jangling. Red blinks at me with her slow eye. Something has happened to this horse. Every so often, she makes a giant leap forwards. She did one, with no drama or fanfare, about four weeks ago. She has gone into another zone. She is so secure and comfortable in her skin, so at home in the world, so confident in her idiotic human that even when that human forgets all the rules, Red has the resources to deal with it.

As I write that, I think: that is the very essence of love. Even if love is an anthropomorphic word, that is what it is. She has got to the stage where she can forgive me, where she can overlook the moments which are not of glad grace, where she remembers the good stuff and can smile at the fleeting failures and hopelessnesses.

Her stillness seeps into me like osmosis. I feel calm roll down on me like a wave. I stand against her great big powerful body, the beautiful thoroughbred body with the blood of mighty champions in it. She has in her pedigree a sonorous roll call of the greats: Nijinsky, Northern Dancer, Hyperion, Gainsborough, St Simon, Voltigeur. And yet, there she stands, peace coming out of her like new air, so strong that it infects even my harried self. I feel it in my stomach and remember that I too am in the world, rooted in the muddy earth, and that storming about like a deranged dervish will not achieve anything.

So we stand there for a while. I lean on her, as if her good body and my crazed body can become one. I run my hands all over her. I rest my cheek on her dear back. I talk to her. She blinks her eye again. In ten minutes, she does not move an inch. She is as present and real and true as any living thing I ever saw.

I have no adjectives to express what this ten minutes feels like. And adjectives are my damn business.

I wrote 1400 words today. I did all my HorseBack stuff. I am about to tackle the new secret project.

If someone were to ask me what was the most important thing I did today,  I would answer in a heartbeat. I would say: I stood still with my horse.

 

Today’s pictures:

From the archive. (No time for camera today; are you mad?)

Can you see the peace?

It emanates from her in waves:

The funny thing is that when I got a thoroughbred, out of racing and polo, I liked the idea of giving myself a challenge. I thought I’d have to get bloody good at riding again, and crazy fit, and bring all my muscles up to peak strength to deal with all that power and spirit. Turns out what I ended up with instead was a little Zen mistress. That is the Law of Unintended Consequences, at its finest.

I don’t have adjectives, but when I’m with her in those precious moments of utter contentment and silent communication, I feel a bit like this:

Or this:

I know. I’m now so nuts in the head I think I am a river and a hill.

Perhaps I really should stop now.

Never enough words.

The rain falls. The day is very quiet, as if Monday has forgotten itself and is still acting like Sunday. I sit down at my desk and start yet another secret secret project.

The secret projects are rather grandiose terms for the ideas that buzz around in my head like flies and will not leave me alone. Sometimes they come to me whole, and I really do wonder if I can write an entire book in a weekend. There is some mad competition where people go into a room and write a novel in 24 hours. I think they used to do it at the Groucho.

Technically, it is possible. I can touch type at seventy-five words a minute. Even allowing for pauses, that should round up to about four thousand words an hour, if the brain is working at full stretch. A novel should be around 90,000 words, but 60,000 will do, and that could be achieved in about fifteen hours. (It would not be much good, but it could logistically be done, with iron tonic and oxygen.)

People did apparently do this, without running mad. The problem is, in the real world, that the mind tires very fast. If I do over a thousand words in one day’s work, my brain switches itself off like a light. It always amazes me that merely sitting at a comfortable desk in a quiet room, tapping lightly with my fingers, imagining, thinking, can create such bodily exhaustion. I scold myself. I am not drilling in rivets all day. I am not humping timber or building dry stone walls. Nor am I doing labour which, whilst not manual, is equally exhausting – negotiating the thickets of office politics under unkind neon lighting. I have good lighting, and a dog, and a view over the Wellingtonias and the old oaks.

Whenever I start a new secret project, I envisage a writing marathon. I’ll go crazy for three days. I’ll take the telephone off the hook and switch off the internet and not ride the mare.

It never works. Yet my idiot, irrational hope springs eternal. The problem is: I want to write about eight books at once, this very minute.

I stop. I take a deep breath. The brain is already fizzing and popping, getting ready to switch off its circuits. The writing day was interrupted by real life, and requests for things, and the usual technological difficulties. At one point, I found the distraction device of the internet marching into my room and luring me to put up photographs on Pinterest. (Why? Why?)

Words did get written. But not enough. Never enough. I suppose one must lash oneself, otherwise the temptation would be to sit about and eat Kit-Kats and think rambling thoughts. But really, a calm little patch of the middle ground would be nice. It does not always have to be all or nothing.

And now, as usual, I am going to sit very, very still.

 

Today’s pictures:

Are actually from yesterday. Today is an ugly, brown, demoralising day. I attempt to keep grumpiness at bay and fail. The mare, despite having water running down her dear face, is actually very good and funny and sanguine, and does not even take to her shelter. Pah; it’s just a bit of weather.

But yesterday, there was LIGHT:

Happy morning in the wild spaces:

Dowager duchess Where is my afternoon tea? face:

The hill, with the weather starting to move in: